Uploading a file?

Does anyone know if blogger allows uploading a file as in - a doc or a pdf. I tried to upload a pdf file, but it seems like other than uploading images it doesnt support uploading any other types of files. But if anyone knows how to do it, then any help is greatly appreciated.... thanks..

'Abhijit Soman' Remembered....

Back in November '05, when my cousin was visiting me, we went visiting a few of her friends here in DC. At the end of the day when we were driving back home late, she asked me - Of all the people you met today, whom did you like the most? I said - Abhijit Soman.

He was a 28-29 year old guy, who had been her school friend back in Pune, India. He was smart, intelligent and modest. He had a good job, a nice house, a wonderful wife, good parents, money - almost everything you could ask for. In addition he also had something more - Leukemia!

In the one hour that we spent at their place, I saw him as a very happy and cheerful person. well we (at least I) felt sorry and pitiful for him. But I could see that he had no such feeling for himself nor did he expect others to feel that way for him. He did not live a sad and depressed life at all. He took an avid interest in politics, reading, in his job, in friends, family etc. He even drove to work. He was pretty independent in almost every aspect. (I wondered if he was like this too when he was alone and by himself...)

He talked to us about his treatment, about what exactly was medically wrong with him. His problem of finding a bone-marrow match, both in US and in India. He told us about his blood transfusion and about how each month, he spent 15 days in the hospital and 15 days at work. Every 15 days he drove himself to the hospital, had blood transfusion and drove back!!

(Wait a sec! Did I hear him right? Did he just say he drove himself to the hospital and back! - Yes I think he did! Whoa!! You must be kidding me?...)

He also had chemo at times. We asked - Doesnt it hurt? Is it tooo bad?. (I have personally seen my aunt go through chemo when she had jaw cancer and I know just how paintful it is!) He replies - Well yes it does. But there is no way out. It helps me buy some time till I find a match. (I soooo much wanted to help him but was totally helpless!!)

I dont know if he had zero fear of his disease - but I could see that he was facing it in the eye and facing it very bravely and seemed comfortable in his own skin and with leukemia.

We then spend some time talking, cracking jokes, they remembered their past school days, and did some catching up on what their other school friends were doing and then we left.

Yesterday I heard that he passed away. The doctors failed to find a bone-marrow match and so they stopped his treatment a month ago. Its unfortunate that none of the research and medical progress till this day could save his life!!

Hats Off to his family, especially his wife for having married him even though she knew he had been diagnosed with leukemia and for being really supportive and making their life happy for the last couple of years that they were together - Is this what we call true love?

Life is just sooo short and all of us take it for granted. We fail to appreciate and cherish the life we have and are constantly cribbing and complaining. We are sad for things that are trivial and fail to see the bigger picture. Personally I do have this realization and I want to live my life fully and cherish it and just be happy, but such events serve as a reminder.

There are so many people who walk in and out of our lives (even though briefly) at various points and each of them consciously or unconsciouly leaves a mark (even though a faint one!). Well, I did not know Abhijit personally, but I think the 60 minutes that I spent with him have left an impression on me and will always be remembered!

Blogs - Web of the Future!

Since the last few months I have been an active member of the blog community! (OK, I agree I havent blogged as much, but hey I spend hours and hours reading other people's blogs and leaving a comment here and there!)... So, the blogs and the blogging have really got me hooked... I have been acquiring a vast amount of diverse information through these blogs than through newspaper websites or television programs or radio shows etc etc... Well, so here are some of my thoughts and ideas about the Web of the Future!!

Blogs - Web of the Future

In the near future, the Web will be predominated by blogs. Currently the blog community (especially people writing blogs) is a very tiny community of people on the web. However, the blogs are expanding and will increasingly become as common-place as Google search.

Essentially I see blogging as a user’s personal account of everyday events, her observations of articles/books read; her ideas and thoughts about news etc. etc. Blogs are also a place where people upload and store media (images, audio, video, links etc). Increasingly blogs are also becoming a very popular way of marketing and advertising and a convenient and easy way for disseminating information. There seems to be tremendous amount of contextual information present in these blogs and hence they have a huge potential in modeling user profile as well as community profile.

Now for a few minutes, let us get away from the idea of a blog as being a static URL where you login, type in your post, publish it and logout. Now suppose we consider each computer as a user’s personal blog – where each action and/or stored media is an event (or a description of an event) and each event is a result of previous actions/events i.e. these events are somehow linked with each other. Now if we provide some sort of a user’s personal web (or a personal web browser instead of the standard Windows desktop) on the computer, which houses all her applications like email clients, messengers, applications like Word, Excel etc. that she might be working on, the IE browser etc. and which also provides functionalities to the user to tag web pages, her own documents and media and share it with others on the Web – then we can use this set of tags and media as well as user’s interaction (switching across applications, pause duration between keyboard hits etc.) to perform social and personalized search. Note that the content provider of current web pages need not provide the user with links/buttons to tag their own content. The user is free to tag/rate content on the web with her own personalized levels of rating etc. (Of course we will have to resolve the issue of comparing these different kinds and levels of personal ratings!). So essentially you don’t go to a blog web page to document about events; but rather each computer becomes a part of the world wide blog community. And within each such blog-computer it is very easy to annotate (tag) anything. Also, everything in this blog-computer is considered to be an event i.e. the tags, the media etc. are all events.

You also need not carry the computer with you; but any computational device (laptop, desktop, palmtop, mobile device) that can be connected to internet can be the user’s personal blog. As soon as the device is connected to the web, the user’s personal web (or personal web browser) gets downloaded and now all her actions/events get recorded and stored centrally. The databases will now probably store an entity called ‘Blog’ containing a list of events and their relationships rather than ‘Web Page’ and their links. There will be privacy issues that will have to be addressed here.

Cool Demos!!

This is a really cool website - http://demo.com/ - which has demos of various applications/products developed by fledgling companies in the areas of social search, media organization, collaboration etc. I was impressed by the quality of these demos (they must be canned obviously! :) ) but still worth taking a look!

Media Immersion Pods

In Tokyo, the New Trend is 'Media Immersion Pods' - An interesting article in the NYTimes.

Makes me wonder if in the future - Will we be consuming media or will the media be consuming us? Will our normal lives, as they are today be a respite from the media consuming us?

Ophidiophobia

Since I was child I have always had scary dreams about snakes. And I am just sooo scared that if I am in any place like residential area which is surrounded by a few trees, running trails in a slightly foresty kind of area, places like Atira in Ahmedabad, hiking paths, rocks with holes, the shortcut route that I used to take behind my apartment in Tempe(Arizona) at nights, all I am thinking about is snakes - What if a snake comes out from here? What if it comes out from there? What if it is right near my feet and I step on it? And the fear is just sooo high that I can actually feel and see a snake right there and I just simply start running and make a dash out of that place!!!

So here is a word that I came across today -

Ophidiophobia meaning fear of snakes.

And here is an article on it in the wikipedia.

Measuring Creativity...

Recently a Harvard freshman 'Kaavya Vishwanathan' shot to fame for receiving a $500,000 contract for her two novels. However, her novels are now facing plagiarism controversy . Just last month a similar case against the 'Da Vinci Code' author 'Dan Brown' saw the final verdict, where Dan Brown was completely acquitted of any plagiarism charges.

Being a student in grad school in USA, I have always seen a lot of emphasis on 'no cheating', 'no copying' - it is considered to be plagiarism etc etc. and you will be punished. Of course cheating, copying etc. is not good and should not be done regardless of where you are but all these buzz words and now a lot of these plagiarism allegations against these authors has led me to think that - 'what exactly is plagiarism?', 'How do we know that something is plagiarised even when its not exactly verbatim?' - after all writing novels is all about creativity and imagination....

So how do you compare one creative piece of writing (or for that matter even drawing, music, dance etc.) against another and say its the same thing with two different forms of representation? or say that its not the same thing and one is better than the other? - or well, if you put it at a much more abstract level then the question is - how do you measure creativity?..

For example - Lets say a child draws a sketch - she draws a mountain, the sunrise with the sun just peeking through the mountains, a river, a man with a boat trying to cross the river, the soft sand on the shore etc. etc... Now how creative is this sketch? Now lets say she adds a few more elements to this sketch - birds flying across the crimson sky, the coconut trees on the shore etc... - Now is this sketch more or less creative than the previous one? Is there a definite set size of elements that have to be present in order for the sketch (or art form) to be considered creative? Now suppose another child draws a sketch with same/similar elements in different numbers and the sketch is shown drawn at a different angle, then is it less creative because it has same/similar elements? will it be called plagiarism? Does plagiarism depend on whether the second child saw or did not see the sketch of the first child? Does the person against whom the allegations are made; depend on the order in which these people published their art forms?

A lot of these questions intrigued me and here is an interesting article I found on the web on "Measuring Creativity". An excerpt from the Introduction -

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how one might devise a test for creativity, and how such a test might differ from related tests for knowledge, skills, general intelligence, verbal intelligence, quantitative intelligence, memory, common sense, personality, and motivation.

And herez an interesting analogy from the conclusion of the artcile -

Creativity may be a bit like pornography was to Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart. He said roughly, "I cannot measure pornography, but I know it when I see it, and I think it ought to be decreased." We may not be able to measure creativity, but we sort of know it when we see it, and it ought to be increased.